Semi-Retirement Made Earlier and Easier

Portfolio Update: October 2017

In less than two weeks’ time, it would mark 7 years dabbling in the stock market for me. Besides these monthly updates, it has been some time since I wrote exclusively about investments and I shall be preparing a series of posts just for this milestone. Yup, peak period for my work is over and I have more free time these days.

Month-on-month, the portfolio rose pretty significantly by $7,000 to reach $428,000 and it’s amazing that the 15HWW Permanent Portfolio is nearing $160,000 in value. This is supposed to be a defensive portfolio but over the past two years, the gains have exceeded $15,000.

Some dividends came in to boost cash levels and there was a buy and sell transaction this month for the Personal Picks sub-portfolio and the DWI Picks sub-portfolio respectively. I am quite happy stacking up cash at this point in time as I anticipate a correction in the markets.

Overall Portfolio (Value: $428,000)

1. 15HWW Permanent PortfolioThe USD appreciated against the SGD earlier in the month, but gave up its gains in the past week, so the exchange rate remained at 1.35.

With the STI ETF, and Berk B doing pretty well during the past month, this sub-portfolio added $2,000 in value and the annualised return is really quite impressive at 8.0%.

USD-SGD Rate: 1.35

UOB 50 Gram PAMP Gold Price: $2,826 x 6 = $16,956

Annualised Return: 8.0% (Jan 2017 to Oct 2017)

2. Personal PicksThe value of this sub-portfolio actually is up by $9,000+ but most of it is due to the addition of 1,600 of Vicom @$5.7. I am not expecting stellar returns from this sleeper stock and it should provide a stable 5-6% returns in the long run inclusive of dividends.Annualised Return: 6.7% (Nov 2010 to Oct 2017)

3. DWI PicksI subscribe to Dr Wealth Insiders (DWI) as a form of diversification. Only time can tell if I had made a good choice. And for obvious reasons, I will not be revealing the make-up of this portfolio. However, I can probably still document it by noting down a few indicators as shown below.

To be fair to Dr Wealth, I am probably under performing their portfolio as I finally appreciate the fact that it’s quite impossible to do a full mirroring at the same prices in the long run. Rather unfortunately, I also did not manage to purchase some of their recent picks which ran up pretty fast.

The DWI portfolio made a sale which I duly copied and this meant the first completed trade in this sub-portfolio actually booked a loss. Hoping for better to come.

Portfolio Value: $81,155

Number of local stocks: 6

Number of international stocks: 4

Annualised Return: 7.5% (Sep 2016 to Oct 2017)

4. WarchestThis is the amount of cash or cash equivalents we have that is ready to be deployed into the markets.

Besides the dividends, we managed to pump in another $2,000+ from our income this month.

I managed my personal portfolio on a spreadsheet, and compute a very raw returns. Could you share how you work out a more meaningful/accurate annualised returns over 1 or 5 years?
(Btw I also quit my job and derive income from tutoring and investing 🙂